• July 20, 2022

UK prime minister race enters final stages with two candidates left: Result to be announced on Sept 5

LONDON July 20: Rishi Sunak has gone through to the final stage of the UK Conservative Party leadership contest, and will lock horns with Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister.

In the 5th round of voting involving three contestants, Sunak topped with 137 votes, followed by Liz Truss with 113.

Penny Mordaunt received 105 votes, the lowest in Wednesday’s contest, and was eliminated form the race.

Sunak continues with his impressive performance, topping every round of voting so far, and by a fair margin.

Sunak and Truss will spend the next few weeks campaigning for the votes of about 180,000 Conservative Party members around the country, who will vote by postal or online ballot. The winner of the party leadership vote will be announced September 5 and will automatically become prime minister.

Sunak will claim credit for steering Britain’s economy through the Covid-19 crash but must overcome accusations that he is too rich and too willing to raise taxes to win the race to be the next prime minister.

Most Conservatives warm to his long-standing pro-Brexit views but some also suspect he deliberately set off the chain of events that led to Boris Johnson’s demise as prime minister by quitting as finance minister in early July.

Sunak is arguing that only he has the experience to get Britain through a looming economic downturn, or possibly a recession.

Sunak has dismissed as “fairy tales” the promises of immediate tax cuts by rivals in the Conservative leadership race but says they will be possible once Britain has controlled inflation, which looks set for double digits soon.

The son of an Indian doctor and pharmacist who were born in east Africa and migrated to Britain in the 1960s, Sunak swapped a lucrative career in finance for parliament in 2015.

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